hotel Sacher, Vienna, winter 2003

art history lessons

i was accompanying R. to Vienna this time. I decided to arrive one day before him. Now i was on rather well-known territory, it was the first time i would not feel lost. I had been to Vienna a lot as a little girl. When travelling to Switzerland to visit my grandparents, we would sometimes cross the border to Austria. My parents always joked that they needed a getaway from the holiday. I liked Geneva, where my grandparents lived, but Vienna always felt like the real treat, for my parents finally relaxed there. Some of my Swiss friends had moved to Vienna, and we went to the kunsthistorische museum.

a Chinese woman was in the room with the paintings of the Dutch masters, accompanied by her son. the woman and the son were both wearing the same lime green parka coats. the woman was sitting on a red plush bench in front of a painting. it was a seascape by van Goyen. the boy was bored, he just kept walking circles around the bench. 

the mother did not notice her son, nor did she notice anything else around her, as she was sound asleep, her head resting on her chest, barely any movement of breath at all. it was a weird situation, as the museum was so crowded. the son tiptoed around her, sometimes bringing his index-finger to his lips as if to hush himself, not to wake her up. i looked at them for a while, and then noticed that there was a strip of medication next to the mother. the leaflet was taken out of the box, as was the strip. there were two or three tablets left in the strip. the tablets were just a notch of a different colour than the limegreen of the mothers coat.

my friends and i walked on. when we had finished visiting all the artwork, admiring some and ignoring other pieces, we came through the same room. nothing had changed. loads of people, the boy walking circles and the mother sound asleep. the boy sat himself next to his mother and sighed. 

i got a very eerie thought: what if the mother had taken an overdose of sleeping pills and was now dying? what if she had decided to kill herself and had wished for two things near her when coming to her end: her little boy and that painting?

it was a turbulent work: a couple of ships at a very wild sea. dark colours, splashing waves. i could imagine wanting to look at a picture before you die, but the boy sitting next to her made the whole image less appealing. i dared not go over to the woman and shake her. that could be so silly if she was just resting. so, me and my friend just walked out of the museum, but somehow the mother and son had clung themselves onto my mind.

that night we had dinner at another friends place. i told the story there, including the lime green matching raincoats. but i could not stop worrying. what if the woman had really decided to kill herself. how long would it take for people to realise it? would she sit upright till closing and would one of the guards find her? or would she all of a sudden just slide of the red velvet couch? or would the boy start crying at one point? first the art lovers in the museum  would respond irritated to that most likely, then they would slowly realise what had happened. would they panic? and what about the boy? what would happen to him?

as dinners go this story was soon replaced by another one, and as the wine and wodka did their work i slowly forgot about it.

On Sunday i was getting a little nervous, the time i could spend in my real life just dwindled away. I was not looking forward to the evening. This was the easiest job i had ever had, in theory. Go to a room, tell a story, get money, travel. 

The intimacy of the deal started to bother me. Or maybe it was the lack of true intimacy. I had to conjure op new images and stories, dig into my memories with the sole purpose to entertain. It made me feel corrupted. Things that were dear to me now lost their value, as they were not truly shared, they were dished up, consumed, and left at that. I had not even dared tell my friends why i had ventured to Vienna. I didn't have the feeling they would understand. 

They took me to the Belvedere Museum, to look at the klimts. The kiss, the Adele Bloch Bauer portrait and my favourite forrest painting, „buchenwald“. i had seen the klimts many times before, and soon started dwelling through other rooms.

One particular painting just struck me completely. it was by Lovis Corinth. A woman sitting next to an aquarium, reading a book. painted at the beginning of last century. you can still feel the slow pace of that century, the quiet. but the future is waiting to happen. the way Corinth used his brush, the speed, like he was anticipating, wanting to leap into the time that irrevocably was to come, was such a difference to the relaxed Sunday afternoon atmosphere he painted there. 

i fell in love with the image. and i remembered the Chinese woman of the day before. i thought, that it i would ever feel like passing away, i would want to do so in front of this very painting. not in a suicide situation, but just taking a nap, and not waking up. it is such a happy and careless picture, a good thing to look at before leaving this world. there was no comfortable couch in this room of the belvedere, so i just sat down on a small blue chair. and looked and looked. the room this picture hung in had been fairly empty. but now, because i was sitting there, studying the painting so intensely, other people started noticing it too. that was funny.

when my friends had finished with the klimts we went outside into the palaces' gardens. my friends and i discussed the painting and whether we would want to die in front of it. all of a sudden, around the corner, came four lime green parka's. the mother and son, the father and a girl. 

i was relieved to see them safe and sound, and hoped the woman would find some rest in the  Lovis Corinth painting. i smiled at them when they passed me, but of course, they did not know who i was or why i smiled at them.

At the hotel, R. still had his glasses on, looking tired. I asked him how he was, if he needed rest. He did need rest he said, the more east his business took him, the more difficult it became. „they don´t seem to understand how it works, that it is give a little take a little in what we do. they always think we try to double cross them. I just want everybody to be happy at the end of the day. Well, the happy end isn't here yet.“ I asked him what exactly the meeting here had been about. he held up his mobile phone. "this". he pointed at his i-book. "that". i make all this technology possible. i find the right people for the right job, and let them work together.  it is simple. new products need to be invented, so that they can be sold. that is one party. then you need the raw materials. the plastic, the copper, the lithium. i interrupted him. "isn't lithium a drug?" lithium is one of the materials you need for a mobile. indium, rare one too, selenium. and you need factories. and those factories need energy. and then there is the transport once the product is finished. i bring all those parties together. that´s what i do. 

i make these products happen, by making the parties involved happy about finding one another. or by getting parties to see that it would be best if they became one company. if that works out, i am the happiest of them all. from now on if you call any of your friends, you can think of me as the guy who made it work for you. satisfied?" he got up and went to the bathroom. when he came back he sat down on the bed. "and you, what did you do?" i told him i had seen art. "there is art here too, in this room." he pointed at a painting on the wall. i had to laugh. and for the first time i let him in on a secret: 

art

i don´t know exactly when it started. but it must have been on one of my filming trips somewhere. same kind of hotel as this one, actually. but as i slept there for more than the usual one or three nights, i started to really be aware of the surroundings, to totally get involved in the atmosphere. not so much the sounds of the hotel, the same guest arriving back to their room at the same time every night, it was a couple. he would brush his teeth first, only running water. she would talk to him incessantly whilst he did is one and a half minute ritual. the woman had an electric toothbrush, so no talking there. it weren´t  those specific occurrences that i felt enthralled in, it was much more the stuff that tends to go really unnoticed. like the wallpaper, the curtains, the ceiling. and all of a sudden the painting that hung opposite to my bed started to severely irritate me. 

it insulted me by being there. it was not uglier than most of the hotelroom paintings. it might even have been a nice picture originally, but as it was a copy it felt very cheap to me. i just did not want to look at it anymore. have you ever remembered one single painting you saw in an hotelroom? i know i haven´t. i think they are designed to leave no impression whatsoever. they should be neutral. undemanding non-offensive, sterile. Flowers, landscapes. Sometimes, especially in these trendy ´design-hotels´ it are nondescriptive and very low profile modern pieces. the more of a businessman hotel you prefer to stay in, have a less personal approach in the choice of the painting. cheap hotels may sometimes have the benefit of the taste or lack of style of the owner. an exception are of course the hotels of mr. Steve Wynn in las Vegas, they have cool art. real Picasso´s. 

i was now in the hotel for the fourth night. the painting was intruding my every thought. at first i had just tried to ignore it. looked the other way. but as the days went by i just got fed up with that stupid picture. i hung a towel over it, but that just made me more aware of the painting underneath. the painting was staring at me. viciously and mocking. as if it was saying: " i will be here long long after you have checked out, you may not approve of me, no body does. but i don´t care. i belong."

the next night i took it down. i was fed up. as long as i was in this room, the painting would not be. that felt much much better. in the morning, just before breakfast i put the painting back on again, i did not want to disturb the cleaning ladies in any way.

that evening, as i took down the painting, i realised that this was not the most handsome  solution to my problem. i like art. and now the hook on which the painting used to hang had such a lonely feel to it. it had become abandoned, useless, it had lost its purpose its reason to exist in that place.

i knew that a lot of crew members took pictures of their loved ones with them, and had them on their bedside tables. i had none of these memorabilia with me.  straightaway, i felt bare myself.

i decided to make my own painting. nicely under the hotel one. and i did. i don´t recall what i drew. i used the hotel stationary pen and my eyebrow pencil. every night i would add some more to the drawing. and every morning i would put the hotel painting back in it´s place. 

i felt so good about it. the room had become mine, but nobody would ever know. from that moment on, it became my own private ritual. as soon as i would get into a room i would take of the picture and make my own.

then, about three years later a thought struck me. i cannot possibly be the only person alive who does this. there must be someone else who once had the same idea. and maybe this person has once slept in the hotelroom i will sleep in eventually. i will take the picture down and discover someone else's. 

i am still waiting to check in to that room.

„did you do a drawing in this hotel too?“ i told him i hadn´t had the time yet. „you want to make one here, for me? And that i watch you whilst you are doing it?“ i said that this would be too personal for me. Then i thought it would be nice if we would do one together. He jumped up and walked to the painting. He tried to take it off, but it was screwed to the wall. „i have to get a drill tomorrow. I want that painting off! I want our masterwork there.“ I asked him if it wouldn't be noisy if he started screwing that painting off. „you´re right, i will do it by hand. We have to do one! It will be fun! You buy pencils tomorrow i will organise the screw driver, and some drinks. I need to be drunk to do this. And go all Dennis Hopper but more act like him did he paint? or whatshisname who did all the splashy paintings?“ i asked him if he meant Jackson Pollock „that´s the one, the action painter. I want to go wild. You want to do that with me? Ah. This will be the best night ever. How am i ever going to sleep now? I will go crazy thinking about tomorrow. I have to call my wife. Sorry.“ 

I left. Dumbfounded. He had a wife. What on earth was i doing here? He was married. Why didn't he take her along? And what would she say if she knew i was there? Even my boyfriend didn't know exactly what i was doing away all the time. I had told him i had to help with research and translation for somebody, all very vague. My boyfriend was abroad all the time himself, so he never asked how or what. But a wife. Why hadn´t i noticed his wedding ring before? Did he actually wear one?  I sat in my room. My painting was also screwed to the wall. This happened more and more often lately. Maybe there actually had been more people with the same idea, and the hotels didn't like it. I could not imagine that people would actually try and steal the paintings, like they seem to do with blowdryers. The man was married. This was something my morals had severe difficulties dealing with.